For you, when singleness feels too real.

BY DREW BROWN

Drew Brown is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can follow him on Twitter @drewbrownwrites or on his website at drewbrownwrites.com.

Last weekend, I watched as one of my best friends from college got married. The processional music began, everyone stood, and suddenly there she was at the head of the aisle. I looked at her soon-to-be husband; tears were freely streaming down his face. That always gets me, and I began tearing up too. As her father walked her down the aisle, the tears running down his face glistened in the late afternoon sun too.

For some reason, though, my tears kept coming. Nothing embarrassing—no sobs—but there was a consistent trickle. Sitting there, I realized the tears weren’t only for their love—they were also for me. I saw every date I had been on, every relationship I had ended or had ended on me. I looked at the altar and the bride and the groom and only saw my unsuccessful love life.

I was staring down twenty-seven and no closer to marriage than I was when I was eighteen.

I was so excited for my friends and genuinely enthralled with love itself, but I was also mourning the absence of it in my own life. There was no plus-one beside me, and my car ride home that night consisted of myself and my Apple Music subscription.

This was never the plan.

I planned on showing up to college as a freshman, meeting a girl who loved used bookstores and church as much as I do, dating her for three years, proposing in December of our senior year on some quaint Main Street in her hometown, marrying her after we graduated, and kissing her at the altar surrounded by family and friends. Small details could change in that plan; for example, we could get engaged at the top of the Empire State Building or in the middle of a Sea World dolphin show (the dolphin would have the ring on the tip of its snout). But being super single at twenty-seven was not an allowed change.

Yet there I was, sitting in a wedding, celebrating marriage, and enveloped in post-break-up loneliness.

So what do you do when the prospect of love just seems like fools’ gold? What do you do when thirty-something married couples tell you “Twenty-seven is so young”? What happens when you feel foolish for hoping for love and immature for not being able to take the long-view of this whole thing?

 The Answer to Everything

This is the place where a better writer would give you an answer that makes you exhale deeply and realize the answer was right in front of you all along.

I wish I were a better writer.

What to Do in the Meantime

I’ve asked a lot of people for advice on how to live well while in this spot, and some of their answers have been really helpful. Granted, none of the answers solve it all. None take away the ache and mild jealousy I get looking at Instagram couples. But, they help me immensely, stuck in this meantime:

• Live. Be human.

• Allow the emotions of a break-up to wash over you. Let tears come if they come but don’t force them if they aren’t there.

• Don’t shop for intimacy in the Band-Aid aisle: whether that be alcohol or drugs or hook-ups or #whathaveyou.

• Seek forgiveness—for others and for yourself.

• Get a good counselor.

• Plug into something greater: faith, art, journaling, cross-country snow-shoeing, etc.

• Eat healthy and buy those two-ounce Häagen-Dazs ice creams at the grocery store.

• Air your dirty laundry to people holding good fabric softeners (aka vulnerability with safe people is hard but essential).

• Keep living. Keep being human.

To You, To Me, To Us (A Toast)

Is it selfish of me to be glad that you—the person reading these words right now—may be relating with me in my predicament, in my pain? I’m sorry if you’re feeling it too. But I’m grateful to not be alone in the seemingly never-ending queue that is singleness. I’m grateful to have someone to stand with, someone to commiserate with and encourage.

So I’ll propose a toast: here’s to not having the answers. Here’s to that ache we get watching Lifetime movies with our moms at Christmastime. Here’s to the hard work it takes to chase after contentment when it’s so much easier to be grumpy and self-conscious.

May we look out for one another—seeing the beauty and grace and essential reality of each other’s existence.

And, finally, may we hold our heads high knowing we are living and breathing and worthy of being seen and loved.

Here’s to you. Here’s to me. Here’s to us.